your words

listened to the tape last night
heard your voice
prayed for a dying or a return
the usual farce from inside
drank of the stars but fell
back on the bed flesh in hand
concentric rings of light
each curving into a scene of you
like vertigo the pump shudders
your low laughter breaks the current
into sparks the semen
spraying a diamond in the lace
and then I was on an asteroid
no sense of movement
the vacuum would not carry
the sound of your words
this rock tumbled through the positions
no ribbons no toe shoes no form
no you

Perhaps the first poem I have found in the piles of detritus that describes an act of self-love. Surely there are others. This piece comes from the time after I was forbidden contact with BF. In retrospect everything was wrong at that point in my existence. I was really primed for this sort of mistake and B. wasn't just any young girl. Her background was complex; her parents intellectuals. She had already had problems living with a charismatic man, her father. Was I charismatic at the time? I think I was. Strange to understand that these many years down the pike. The static image of life on an asteroid with no sound pretty much captures the months after the affair with B. ended. I was actually unable to perform sexually for awhile there, until Alison Gaughan came to town and did what she did best. After that I moped around about B., drinking too much and treating Pat terribly, until at long last I moved out in 1981. Probably people think it had something to do with Bradway, but it didn't really. She was just the next girl who thought I was charismatic, in those days. I did have a tape of B. and myself and JdB pretending to be on the radio that I used to occasionally play. I finally got rid of it after BB left me in 1993.